Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton Science Library) Paperback – February 1, 2009

When Charles Darwin published "The Origin of Species", it was greeted equally by widespread acceptance and outrage. The acceptance was due to the realisation that here, at last, was a mechanism explaining the workings of life. The outrage was expressed over what this meant about human beings. Could we be relegated to the status of "mere animals"? Frans de Waal has merged the two views to show that we indeed are closely related to other animals. As a social species we share behaviour traits with other creatures who live in groups. While most of today's objections to "Darwinism" centre on the loss of "morality", the author notes that instead we should rejoice in sharing something so fundamental.

In these exquisitely written essays - the Tanner Lectures - de Waal shows how behaviour in various species, particularly our closest cousins the great apes, exhibits moral issues daily confronted and resolved. His research has led him to challenge one of Western society's most commonly held shibboleths - that morality is limited to human beings and that it lies as a thin layer over our animal instincts. Labelled by de Waal as the Veneer Theory, he attributes its source to Thomas Henry Huxley, also known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defence of natural selection. Huxley, along with Alfred Russel Wallace, thought that human reasoning was to ?? mechanism lifting us above the remainder of the animals. The author notes the irony of Darwin's most vocal defender countering the naturalist's own stance that morality in humans is reflected in ape behaviour. De Waal forcibly contests Huxley's view, arguing that moral decisions result from our being a social species. Survival meant cooperation from our earliest evolutionary state, and was strengthened by selection pressures over time.

De Waal cites numerous examples of how chimpanzees reconcile after fights, intercede to stop or prevent conflicts, share resources and console those in pain or stress. Young chimps are guarded away from zoo moats because even adult chimpanzees cannot swim. Individuals with no stake in particular events may intercede because a situation may lead to a threat to the entire troop. One example, the ape rescuing a human child in the Chicago Zoo, is well known. A less celebrated but far more significant event is the rescue and release of an injured bird by a bonobo. Not only is this a striking example of cross-species empathy, but the bonobo went to the effort of climbing a tree as high as she could to provide the bird with the optimum means of escape. In the recent past when such circumstances led to the equating of human and animal behaviour, it was derided as "anthropomorphising" zoology. De Waal notes that the terms many object to equating behaviour not only lack substitutes, but merely reflect the evolutionary realities. Our behaviour equates ape behaviour because our species have a common ancestor.

There are other complaints about de Waal's findings and conclusions. The editors have gathered a few notables to assess the material presented here. At the forefront of the commenters stand philosophers, not primatologists. Robert Wright, Philip Kitcher, Christine Korsgaard and Peter Singer among them. While they accept that ape, particularly chimpanzee, actions seem to indicate cooperation and empathy similar to that of humans, they have doubts about motivation levels. They also spend much ink in dealing with the definition of terms. Lack of understanding of how many generations of natural selection can guide behaviour, most of these critics fall into the trap of contriving isolated thought experiment events without considering the long-term biological roots of those traits. It's a common problem when philosophers attempt to deal with evolutionary questions. As de Waal notes, over a generation ago, Edward O. Wilson suggested that the study of ethics be relocated from philosophy departments and placed in biology. That is a step that remains to be taken, but this book should prompt quicker action. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Reading Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal made me eager to read this book. I liked de Waal's style in that book -- somewhat rambling and anecdotal, with lots of stories and no footnotes.

But I did not find that here. Primates and Philosophers is a very different kind of book. Only about half of it was written by de Waal. And that half is written in a much more scholarly style than typical de Waal writing. Perhaps the fact that he had two editors had something to do with it. Or the fact that this book grew out of lectures at Princeton and is published by the Princeton University Press.

Whatever the reason, I missed de Waal's fresh and breezy style and found this book to be hard to get through. The format did not help much either, with de Waal writing first and last, and commentators getting their critique in in between. Although an interesting concept, here it seemed to stretch too little meat over too many bones.

There are some interesting ideas in the book. Even a few ape stories. Too bad the ideas and the stories are presented in a style that tends to hide them among somewhat pedantic prose.

Unlike de Waal's other books, which are a fun and delightful read, this book requires hard work. To me, it was probably worth it -- once. But this is one de Waal book that I will not be reading again.

Primates and Philosophers is not a comprehensive analysis of the origins of morality, but focuses on one minutia of the subject: whether human morality goes deep into our evolutionary past or is new with the arrival of our bulbous brains and cultures. The answer depends on how morality is defined. If moral behavior falls under the definition of morality, it seems clear that other primates such as chimps share at least rudimentary moral behavior. But if morality is defined as abstract thinking about right and wrong and living by principles derived abstractly, then morality must be pretty recent in humans' evolutionary past.

De Waal quotes Richard Dawkins as saying "we, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators" and "[we are] nicer than is good for our selfish genes." De Waal takes this as lending support of what he calls 'veneer theory', the position that morality is "a cultural overlay, a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish and brutish nature." Having read seven of Richard Dawkins' books, I feel like I understand his views pretty well, and I don't think he would agree with veneer theory at all. I think there is some ambiguity here between proper domain vs. actual domain. The proper domain is the conditions under which a behavior evolved, and the actual domain is the conditions under which the behavior is manifest. Sometimes they are the same, sometimes not. For example, the proper domain of a moth's light-sensitive navigation system is a light source in the dark that an ancient moth would have encountered, such as the moon. But today, the actual domain may be a light bulb, candle, or bug zapper. The navigation system doesn't work correctly when the source of light is nearby, and it causes moths to spiral into light sources, sometimes to their deaths. Our genes (and moth genes) provide rules-of-thumb that aren't necessarily survival-enhancing in every conceivable actual domain; it is only necessary that these rules were useful on average to our ancestors in our evolutionary past. So saying that we are "nicer than is good for our selfish genes" in the world we currently live in, which is much different than our evolutionary past, is not to imply some mysterious cause outside of nature accounts for this deviation. Similarly, every time we use contraception we are "rebelling against the tyranny of the selfish replicators" because the proper domain (in the technical sense) of sex is procreation, but the actual domain may be recreation. Having as many offspring as possible would be beneficial to our genes, but we can obviously choose not to do so.

In a table on page 22, de Waal compares veneer theory to his own theory of the evolution of ethics. Under veneer theory, he lists Richard Dawkins as an advocate and states that the empirical evidence in favor of that theory is "none." This is a textbook straw man, and I am confident that at least one of the alleged "advocates" is no advocate at all.

On the next page, de Waal hastily concludes that Steven Pinker's brilliant work on human language skills requires "postulating discontinuities" in evolution and thus is saltatory. Apparently he takes it as self-evident that a language module in the brain cannot possibly evolve by gradual degrees, although I'm baffled as to why he thinks that.

In Christine Korsgaard's section, she writes "it is absurd to think that nonhuman animals are motivated by self-interest...acting for the sake of your best interests requires the capacity to be motivated by the abstract conception of your overall long-term good." [p 102] Self interest, I think, can be pretty simply defined as the most effective way of spreading your genes. There is no need to have a conscious conception of what that consists of because the genes that program the best gene-spreading behavior are automatically propagated. I found Korsgaard's chapter to be lacking in scientific rigor. She seemed to make conclusions about empirical questions based on casual observation and reasoning. However, she did provide a clear definition of morality which was lacking from de Waal's part.

In Phillip Kitcher's section, he defines four dimensions of 'altruism space': intensity (the degree to which one meets the needs or desires of others), range (how high can the stakes get before one acts selfishly), extent (the set of individuals one acts altruistically toward), and skill (ability to discern the desires of the beneficiary). He agrees that non-human primate morality lies somewhere in the defined 'altruism space' away from pure selfishness, but until we have a clear definition of the ideal moral individual with respect to these four dimensions, "it's premature to claim that human morality is a 'direct outgrowth' of tendencies [non-human primates] share." [p 129] But if non-human primate morality differs by degree and not by kind (as implied here) is it not reasonable to conjecture that human morality is a direct outgrowth of the tendencies of primates?

Kitcher goes on to say that when chimpanzees are faced with an opportunity for altruism, their impulses for selfishness and altruism duke it out and they are ultimately "vulnerable to whichever impulse happens to be dominant at a particular moment." But I am far from convinced that humans are much different. Since when have we humans overcome our impulses? As Peter Singer argues later in the book, our emotional impulses constitute a large part of our morality. In those rare cases where abstract thinking overturns our gut reactions to moral questions, one could argue we are not acting on impulse but on reason. But those cases probably represent a vast minority of moral judgments. As de Waals mentioned, moralistic and altruistic intuitions come from deep in the evolutionarily ancient part of the brain, and conscious rationalization of those intuitions does not mean we've overcome them. Steven Pinker has revealed a world in which unconscious brain processes have profound impacts on our thoughts and decisions even though, by definition, we don't notice them. But we surely notice when they're gone, such as in people who have suffered damage to various parts of the brain, leaving certain parts of the intellect unscathed while some capacities are completely destroyed.

Peter Singer's section was the highlight of this book. I found his section better-argued than the others and his explanations more compelling. "Like the other social mammals, we have automatic, emotional responses to certain kinds of behavior, and these responses constitute a large part of our morality. Unlike the other social mammals, we can reflect on our emotional responses, and choose to reject them." [p 149] "Perhaps we do so only on the basis of other emotional responses, but the process involves reason and abstraction." Singer points out that this ability to reflect and abstract is evolved not just to make moral choices but is useful in many other parts of life as well.